913 Quotes by Yuval Noah Harari

Unfortunately, in the present political climate any critical thinking about liberalism and democracy might be hijacked by autocrats and various illiberal movements, whose sole interest is to discredit liberal democracy rather than to engage in an open discussion about the future of humanity. While they are more than happy to debate the problems of liberal democracy, they have almost no tolerance of any criticism directed at them.

The third threat to liberalism is that some people will remain both indispensable and undecipherable, but they will constitute a small and privileged elite of upgraded humans.

Liberalism will collapse on the day the system knows me better than I know myself.

A huge gulf is opening between liberal humanism and the latest findings of the life sciences, a gulf we cannot ignore much longer

THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION IS ONE the of the most controversial events in history. Some partisans proclaim that it set humankind on the road to prosperity and progress. Others insist that it led to perdition.

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and tospawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where theycan’t live without it.

The body. It’s not easy to carry around, specially when encased inside a massive skull. It’s even harder to fuel. In Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2–3 per cent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 per cent of the body’s energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8 per cent of rest-time energy.

Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spentmore time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a governmentdiverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from bicepsto neurons.

Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or wolf, but because Homo sapiens is the only species on earth capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers. Intelligence and toolmaking were obviously very important as well. But if humans had not learned to cooperate flexibly in large numbers, our crafty brains and deft hands would still be splitting flint stones rather than uranium atoms.